Top software for amazon sellers for 2020

Amazon: The world’s leading e-commerce giant

With more than 150.6 million users accessing the Amazon application in September 2019 in the United States alone. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is the world’s most popular online shopping platform in modern times. What started as a humble business in Jeff Bezos’s garage 25 years ago was crowned as the biggest company in the world. Moreover, statistics have revealed that Amazon’s market capitalization has even surpassed that of Microsoft in 2019. According to Statistics by Feedvisor in 2019, 89% of the buyers prefer purchasing products from Amazon than other platforms. Further statistics from Scrapehero have revealed that Amazon had up to as much as 119,928,851 products in its online store in April 2019.

Amazon has claimed that on an average the small and medium-sized businesses operating on its platform sell about 4000 products every minute. Amazon’s success is a result of the flexibilities and the ease that it provides sellers operating on its platform. Not only does it provide monetary incentives to its sellers, but it also allows them to build their business network by interacting with people from varying industrial backgrounds. According to figures revealed by Marketplacepulse in 2019, there are over 2.5 million sellers currently selling their products on the Amazon platform.

The digital era and Amazon sellers

With the digital era in full swing, more people are expected to join the e-commerce industry as Amazon sellers. Naturally, with the spike in the number, the competition is expected to increase as well. As an Amazon seller, it is important to be familiar with the basics of running an FBA Amazon business and have knowledge about the different tools used by sellers worldwide.

Our accountants have worked with different amazon sellers, they have used their expertise to prepare a comprehensive list of tools that you can use to effectively handle various aspects when selling on amazon such as pricing, finance, customer feedback, inventory management etc. Our article is focused on some of the best tools available in our and our customer’s opinion as available for Amazon sellers.

To make it easier for you, we have categorized the tools into three sections:

1. Free tools for beginners
2. User-specific tools
3. Holistic tools

You can speak to our Amazon accountants to learn more about how you can successfully set your business on Amazon.

Related: View our startup guide if you are just starting a new business.

Video: How to create an Amazon Seller Account in 2020

Watch this video to learn how to create a Seller Account on Amazon?

Free Amazon Seller tools for beginners

There are plenty of tools available for Amazon sellers. However, only a few of them might be appropriate for beginners, more importantly, as a new business, you might be short on cash too. Therefore, it would be better to get a tool that either doesn’t cost too much. For this purpose, we have compiled a list of free tools that can help you speed-up your business operations.

• Sonar
• Camelcamelcamel
• Octoparse
• Amazon seller app

1. Sonar

As an Amazon seller, you should be aware of what your target audience search about the most. This information helps you list your Amazon products. You will need to research the most trending keywords to list your Amazon products accordingly. Sonar helps sellers find the keywords exclusively used on Amazon and filters from other search engines like Google.

Sonar is absolutely free of cost, and it is a wise option for those selling trendy products to boost their profits.

Specialized features:

• Extensive and in-depth keyword research
• Reverse ASIN lookups

Price: Free of charges

Drawback: Sonar does not update its database often, which means there might be missing keywords.

2. CamelCamelCamel

As an Amazon seller, you are required to be well-versed with the price bracket of millions of products on its platform. CamelCamelCamel is the perfect tool that provides this information to beginners, that too free of cost. The tool consists of add-ons, extensions, tips and tricks that can help you get your FBA business off the charts.

Specialized features: 

• Helps in keyword research.
• Notifies you of any price drops.
• Helps you see the price history of millions of Amazon products.
• Provides price history add-ons that can be integrated with your browser.

Pricing: Free of cost

Drawback: Camelcamelcamel solely focuses on price and is unable to provide insight into the volume of sales and level of competition.

If you are unsure about how to set up an effective pricing strategy, you can find more information from our pricing strategy guide.

3. Octoparse

To make your Amazon business a success, you will need to come up with different marketing strategies to boost your profitability. Effective strategies can only be designed if the seller has an updated database regarding products and competitors.

If you are struggling to extract reliable data from Amazon, then you can integrate Octoparse with your Amazon seller account. The tool provides data about product details, competitor profile, customer feedback and many other elements. The best part is, this tool offers a free package as well.

Specialized features:

• Helps in data scraping.
• Helps extract precise web-data.
• Offers cloud service.
• Helps extract data in any format suitable for your business.
• Helps you deal with 98% of the websites without coding.

Pricing: You can choose one of the three packages, of which one is absolutely free. You can also avail their monthly/quarterly/yearly subscription packages (standard and premium packages). You can consult Octaparse.com to learn more.

Drawbacks: 

• Extracting heavy data can be time-consuming.
• You might have to deal with a lot of bugs when extracting data from complex websites using a data scraping tool.

4. Amazon Seller Apps

Amazon Seller App is the perfect free tool that can help you with your retail arbitrage. If you don’t want to spend heavily on upfront investment and you want to test the scope and profitability of the products you wish to sell, Amazon Seller Apps can provide you with guidance about what price you should be offering on your products. Its most notable function is that it is able to scan items and suggest a relative selling price that might be suitable for your FBA business.

We advise you to use this tool if you are playing at a beginner level in the Amazon realm. 

Specialized features:

• Help you get a glance at your business performance.
• Suggests what price you should offer on your products.
• Helps manage sponsored product campaigns.
• Instantly respond to buyer queries.

Pricing: Free of charge.

Drawbacks: 

• The tool does not include factors like customs fees, shipping costs, tax when showing a product’s price.
• Amazon Seller Apps does not integrate with popular extensions like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel, which help in product sourcing decisions.

User-specific tools for Amazon sellers

If you have been selling on the Amazon platform for a certain period and are planning to take your business to the next level. Then it is time you start paying attention towards each element of the e-commerce industry. This will require you to use specialised tools built for specific purposes; for instance, you might require an expert tool to improve your pricing. At one point, you might even require a tool to help you manage your inventory effectively.

For this purpose, we have curated a list of user-specific tools to target a niche. These tools can help boost the performance of different aspects of your FBA business depending on what special functionality each offers.

• Profit Bandit
• Jungle Scout
• SellerLegend
• Shopkeeper

1. Profit bandit

Profit Bandit is one of the most useful Amazon tools for sales and retail arbitrage. It helps small and medium-sized businesses to boost their profitability. It also offers the best price scanner that can provide a complete outlook of the profits for every product, and you scan through your smartphone. The tool helps Amazon Sellers conduct detailed in-store profit research on the products they wish to purchase and resell as well.

Specialized features:

• Helps calculate potential profits on the products you wish to buy.
• Has a built-in lightning fast scanner/Bluetooth option.
• Helps extract pricing data from other websites.
• Warns you of any product that can’t be listed on Amazon.
• Helps you get a glance at your sales rank.

Pricing: $9.99/month

Drawbacks: 

• Consumes a lot of battery.
• Dependability on an internet connection.
• Potential communication glitches between Amazon and the application, which cause the application to crash.

2. Jungle scout:

Jungle scout helps Amazon sellers become more time-efficient. Additionally, it offers data insights that can be useful to make certain analyses. An excellent research and sales analytics tool, Jungle scout, can be an incredible assistant to help you organize and track your Amazon sales data in real-time These functionalities allow Amazon FBA business to work on profit-building and other cost-cutting techniques.

Specialized features:

• Help gather a reliable product database by utilizing the most accurate data.
• It is a great product tracker.
• Helps you track your Amazon finances.
• Lets you filter out irrelevant products from the results pages.
• Gives an overview of historical trends of price.
• Lets you overview historical trends.
• Helps you analyze Google trends with its built-in functionality.

Pricing: 

Jungle Scout: Non-sellers

$49/month- $468/ year

• Lets you track 150 products
• Lets you enjoy Product Tracker, Database, Opportunity Finder, Supplier database and Keyword Scout features.
• 5 additional users can use this offer.

Jungle Scout and extension bundle:

$69/month-$588/year

• Additional features: Enjoy competitive data, sales estimates and profit projections on Amazon.
• Lets you track 150 products.
• Lets you enjoy Product Tracker, Database, Opportunity Finder, Supplier database and Keyword Scout features.
• 5 additional users can use this offer.

Jungle Scout: Sellers plan

Starts at $49/month- $468/year (Price depends on the number of orders your account processes in a period of 30 days)

• Lets you track 150 products.
• Lets you enjoy Product Tracker, Database, Opportunity Finder, Supplier database and Keyword Scout features along with Launch and Sales Analytics.
• 5 additional users can use this offer.

Pricing tiers: 

• Upto 500 orders/month = $49/month
• 501- 2,000 orders/month = $69/month
• 2,001- 5,000 orders/month = $99/month
• 5,001-10,000 orders/month = $199/month
• 10,000+ orders/month = $399/month

Speak to our Amazon Accountants to get guidance on how to budget for tools based on its use and ROI for your Amazon FBA business.

Drawbacks:

• In the extension plan, you may find that some features are limited by a product name or search.
• Offers a limited number of tutorial videos for beginners, this may be very confusing for new users.
• Chrome extension is sold and invoiced separately.

3. SellerLegend

Designing a solid FBA strategy requires one to inspect every aspect of a business in detail. While doing so, you might overlook things that can impact the accuracy of your profit calculation. Therefore, for this reason, you need a tool that can save the effort and time in guesswork and provide you with accurate results to improve your pricing strategy.

There are several profit tracking tools like Helium 10 and Sellics. However, SellerLegend provides features that outperform them all.

Specialized features:

• Conducts quality sales, profit and trend analysis.
• Assists in product management.
• Assists in inventory management.
• Help estimate sophisticated expenses and VAT for European markets.
• Offers guest access for employees and accountants.
• Offers quality data insights.

Pricing: $49.99/month for up to 2500 orders, $99.9/month when handling up to 50000 orders.

Drawback: does not offer a free trial.

4. Shopkeeper

Inventory management becomes easier when you have a specialized tool to track, store and maintain it. Shopkeeper is the ideal Amazon stock tracker tool that offers multiple features to help you with inventory tracking.

Shopkeeper can help business owners provide a quick overview of the inventory in-stock. Moreover, it may provide an estimate of how long the inventory can last based on past sales data.

Specialized features:

• Offers quality inventory management tools and provides insights into the value and expected timescale the inventory can cover.
• Helps in inventory forecasting.
• Provides hijacker alerts.
• Offers profit tracking.
• Shows detailed business dashboards that include all the key metrics.

Pricing: Pricing is tiered into four plans as shown below

• Novice plan = $20/month
• Intermediate plan = $45/month
• Master plan = $90/month
• Ballin’ outta control plan = $250/month

Drawbacks: 

• You cannot upload bulk files yourself unless you contact the email support to help you through the process.
• It does not automatically enter product costs, so you will have to enter individual costs like shipping and manufacturing manually.

Holistic tools for Amazon sellers

If you feel you are short on time and money and plan to spend minimum time using tools in your Amazon business. Then you need tools that can help to keep up with different elements. Our accountants have provided details about some of the very useful holistic tools that can help keep your Amazon FBA business ahead of your competition.

• Sellics
• Cashcow pro
• Feedback Whiz
• Helium 10

1. Sellics

Sellics is like a one-stop-shop for all your Amazon business needs. It covers a wide range of relevant functions for your business such as SEO, PPC, competitor Analysis and inventory management.

Sellics has the capability to improve business practices by translating the data and metrics provided by Amazon into doable steps. It offers two versions, the seller version and the vendor version. The seller version is specifically designed for individuals who are not required to deal with a large amount of inventory. While the vendor version is for businesses that deal directly through Amazon Vendor’s Central interface.

Managing an FBA business can become quite frustrating at times.  A tool like Sellics under your radar can help you get everything on track.

Specialized features:

• Sellics includes keywords and analytics that comprise of keyword rankings of your amazon business and your competitors’. It also includes A/B split testing.
• Sellics has an Amazon Sales Rank tool that can cover pricing history, product tracking, sales rank and sales volumes.
• It also has sales data that can help estimate profits, PPC costs, sales velocity and can assist in competitor analysis.
• Sellics app includes a PPC Management Suite that includes control of your PPC outside Seller Central.

Pricing: It offers a monthly plan, bi-annual plan and an annual plan. Pricing depends on your Amazon annual turnover (each plan includes all of the seller edition features)

• The monthly package starts from $57/month.
• For annual sales of $1K-60K= Monthly package ($67/month), Biannual plan ($57/month), Annual plan ($47/month).

Drawbacks:

• Sellics does not estimate ROI.
• You might not be able to use a number of features without connecting your Sellics account to Amazon’s seller central.
• The seller version of this app is only limited to one seller central account at a time.

2. CashCowPro

If you have expertise in data handling, then it will be easier for you to get a grip on how to use CashCowPro quickly. CashCowPro is primarily famous for how it presents net profit figures both in terms of the currency and percentage. It is able to estimate an accurate return on investments (ROIs) that help maintain the vitality of the business. 

CashCowPro brings a lot of useful tools and value in its package, tools that can help you in the early stages by offering numerous features that can keep up with the daily requirements of your FBA business.

Specialized features:

• Can track up to 100 keywords per product.
• Helps track and monitor inventory.
• Its automated features help in feedback collection, along with unlimited follow-up emails and optimized send times.
• It includes page views and conversion data.
• It has A/B split testing tools.

Pricing: Monthly package ($99.7/month) Annual package ($997)

Drawbacks

• Provides insights into your sales from each marketplace individually but fails to provide the total sales figures from all the marketplaces collectively.
• Has a somewhat misleading layout and does not allow you to hide inactive listings.

3. Feedback Whiz

Another Amazon seller tool that falls into the list of holistic tools category is FeedbackWhiz. Unlike its name, it offers a wide variety of services on a single platform ranging from product reviews, email automation, customer feedback and analytics. Moreover, this tool helps save time by keeping your data organized.

The features incorporated in this tool function extraordinarily well; for instance, the emailing and order management tools have been integrated together to help deal with customer queries rapidly and efficiently.

FeedbackWhiz offers incredible email customisation options that can customize according to the specifications of the product and target market’s behaviour. Moreover, its quality data analysis can help you track the performance of your business effectively. It can also help you modify existing strategies or build entirely new strategies from scratch to promote sales or marketing.

Specialized features:

• Offers order management tools.
• Helps create customized emails, attract positive feedback.
• Alerts you of any negative feedback.
• Helps you organize, manage and view customer feedback on a single screen.
• Offers quality email automation.

Pricing: There are 5 packages: Free package, Starter package ($19.99/month), Basic package ($39.99/month), Professional package ($79.99/month), Ultimate package ($139.99/month).

Drawbacks:

• Does not offer exceptional customer support
• It only supports a limited number of Amazon marketplaces

4. Helium 10

Another seller tool that deserves to be included in our list of holistic tools is Helium 10. Helium 10 leads the competition by offering 17 incredible features. These features can help you with product research, sales analysis, listing optimization, automation and much more. 

Helium 10 can be your detective if you extend its use over competitor analysis to keep an eye on the most relevant updates within the industry. With so many different suites available on a single platform, Helium 10’s versatility provides a great value for money.

Specialized features:

• Helps verify whether the listing’s keywords are being indexed.
• Helps you keep an eye on the overall business performance.
• Analyzes the sales pattern and seasonality of any product.
• Reveals the most suitable keywords for your listings.
• Warns you by providing alerts of any potential fraud or hijacking.

Tools you get to access through Helium10:

1. Blackbox
2. Trendster 
3. Magnet^2
4. Scribbles
5. Frankenstein
6. Cerebro
7. Index checker
8. Inventory protector

And many more.

Pricing: Free plan, A la Carte plan ($17/month), Platinum plan ($97/month), Diamond plan ($197/month), Elite plan ($397/month)

Drawbacks: 

• The free version of this app offers very limited services.
• Helium 10 is relatively expensive.
• Helium 10 does not have a mobile application.

Tools are ultimately tools, how they add value depends on the user, and how the tool is being used. Before you start using tools, make sure you do your market research and build a business with a strong foundation.

Clear House Accountants are expert e-commerce accountants in London. Our accountants provide services to a number of Amazon and e-commerce businesses to help them manage their finances, inventory and get more control over their business and tax responsibilities. Speak to us to learn more.

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